The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig; a Novel eBook

CHAPTER XIX

MADAM BOWKER’S BLESSING

“If you like I’ll go up and tell your
grandmother,” said Craig, breaking the silence
as they neared the hotel. But Margaret’s
brain had resumed its normal function, was making up
for the time it had lost. With the shaking off
of the daze had come amazement at finding herself
married. In the same circumstances a man would
have been incapacitated for action; Craig, who had
been so reckless, so headlong a few minutes before,
was now timid, irresolute, prey to alarms. But
women, beneath the pose which man’s resolute
apotheosis of woman as the embodiment of unreasoning
imagination has enforced upon them, are rarely so
imaginative that the practical is wholly obscured.
Margaret was accepting the situation, was planning
soberly to turn it to the best advantage. Obviously,
much hung upon this unconventional, this vulgarly-sensational
marriage being diplomatically announced to the person
from whom she expected to get an income of her own.
“No,” said she to Joshua, in response to
his nervously-made offer. “You must wait
down in the office while I tell her. At the proper
time I’ll send for you.”

She spoke friendlily enough, with an inviting suggestion
of their common interests. But Craig found it
uncomfortable even to look at her. Now that the
crisis was over his weaknesses were returning; he
could not believe he had dared bear off this “delicate,
refined creature,” this woman whom “any
one can see at a glance is a patrician of patricians.”
That kind of nervousness as quickly spreads through
every part, moral, mental and physical, of a man not
sure of himself as a fire through a haystack.
He could not conceal his awe of her. She saw
that something was wrong with him; being herself in
no “patrician” mood, but, on the contrary,
in a mood that was most humanly plebeian, she quite
missed the cause of his clumsy embarrassment and constraint;
she suspected a sudden physical ailment. “It’ll
be some time, I expect,” said she. “Don’t
bother to hang around. I’ll send a note
to the desk, and you can inquire—­say, in
half an hour or so.”

“Half an hour!” he cried in dismay.
Whatever should he do with himself, alone with these
returned terrors, and with no Margaret there to make
him ashamed not to give braver battle to them.

“An hour, then.”

She nodded, shook hands with a blush and a smile,
not without its gleam of appreciation of the queerness
of the situation. He lifted his hat, made a nervous,
formal bow and turned away, though no car was there.
As the elevator was starting up with her he came hurrying
back.

“One moment,” he said. “I quite
forgot.”

She joined him and they stood aside, in the shelter
of a great wrap-rack. “You can tell your
grandmother—­it may help to smooth things
over—­that my appointment as Attorney-General
will be announced day after to-morrow.”